Powerful relationships: media and leaders

Here's one thing that Stephen Conroy's media inquiry won't be examining: the secretive, non-transparent relationship between proprietors of powerful media companies and politicians and the consequences of this relationship for the conduct of government and politics in Australia.

One of the most startling and unedifying sights in the wake of the News International phone-hacking scandal in the UK was the House of Commons question time the day after Rupert and James Murdoch had appeared before a Commons select committee to more or less prostrate themselves at the feet of a bunch of politicians.

From prime minister David Cameron to former prime minister Gordon Brown, the cream of British politicians stood up in the home of parliaments to flagellate themselves for having been cowardly, timid, intimidated, hypocritical and secretive in their dealings with Rupert Murdoch and the Murdoch media empire. And as one, they promised never to behave that way again. Ever.

We will see. That promise will be honoured only if the Murdoch empire in Britain is seriously and permanently damaged by the phone-hacking scandal and other revelations still to come. If that happens, the timid and the cowardly can become the brave and the fearless politicians they are promising to be. If Murdoch's empire remains more or less intact, there will be, over time, kissing and making up. In private of course.

The big, unspoken issue with concentration of media ownership - an issue that Bob Brown reckons Conroy's inquiry will examine despite the fact that Conroy has ruled it out - is about power and how the exercise of that power distorts the political process.

Who can forget, for instance, the way the late Kerry Packer, media mogul, made them quake in their boots when he appeared before a parliamentary committee? That quaking had little to do with Packer's intellectual brilliance nor even his size and bullying tone, but everything to do with the fact that he owned Channel 9 and a raft of magazines.

Virtually every Australian prime minister for decades has asked for an audience with Rupert Murdoch in New York - for a Rupert blessing we must assume - and have then come out after the meeting and refused to answer questions about what was discussed. With a media mogul for goodness sake.

So will prime ministers, past and present, be called before the Conroy inquiry to be grilled by the retired Federal Court Judge Ray Finkelstein, about their relationship with media moguls, past and present? That would make this a worthwhile inquiry. Of course, this is outside the terms of reference and won't happen.

The Conroy inquiry is the result of the UK News International phone-hacking scandal. The inquiry was Bob Brown's idea. He could see that that the Murdoch empire had been seriously weakened everywhere, including in Australia and that the time was right for him to push for an inquiry that would give News limited - the hate media - a good whacking while it was down and perhaps even hasten the end of its Australian dominance in print.

But from an Australian perspective, the fall-out of the News International scandal is not really about whether the unethical and criminal behaviour of senior executives of News International and their underlings is standard operating procedure here. It isn't. The real question is whether Australian politicians have behaved as cravenly as their UK counterparts, in their relations with Murdoch and other media masters of the universe.

That won't be examined by this inquiry or any other government-appointed inquiry any time soon. What we are left with according to the terms of reference, is an inquiry into an industry in decline. Some would argue in terminal decline. Indeed, it's possible that by the time Ray Finkelstein and Matthew Ricketson deliver their report early next year, the state of the newspaper industry may be such that their findings will be out of date and irrelevant.

It is not clear how this inquiry will be conducted. Will there, for instance, be public hearings at which senior newspaper executives will be grilled about the state of their papers? About what they are doing to address the fact that they are more or less stuck in a 20th century manufacturing business in a 21st century digital world?

Will there be an examination of the consequences for a liberal democracy if major newspapers go out of business? Will the inquiry canvass what the role of government should and could be to find ways to support not newspaper companies, but the journalism that is under threat as a result of the fact that the newspaper business model is broken?

If these questions are examined by the Conroy inquiry and crucially, if senior newspaper executives agree to be questioned by Finkelstein and provide real answers beyond mantras about a free media and their support of quality journalism - whatever that means - the inquiry will be worthwhile.

The other terms of reference - for instance, looking at whether newspapers should be more regulated, perhaps by a beefed-up Press Council and whether the codes of conduct of newspaper companies work to produce 'ethical' journalism - will, in my view, produce nothing of value unless the issue of the future of newspapers is at the centre of this inquiry.

For what it's worth, I believe government – taxpayers - ought to fund public interest journalism, in the same way that it funds other cultural work. I am not talking about funding newspapers directly, but a sort of Australia Council grants system that helps fund digital and even print and broadcast journalism start-ups. The Federal Government already funds a major journalism enterprise in the ABC. I see no reason in principle why the ABC should have exclusivity of funding.

I know that Stephen Conroy and other senior cabinet ministers have been genuinely concerned for some time about the crisis in Australian newspapers. I know that they have thought about the possibility of government funding for journalism. Perhaps Conroy and others will appear before the inquiry and share with us their thinking on this issue.

Okay then, let's get on with this inquiry and hope for the best.

Michael Gawenda is a former Editor in Chief of The Age and Director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism at Melbourne University.